Article by Sikivu Hutchinson for The Humanist

Black youth who reject organized religion don’t have the social and economic benefits of white privilege to blunt their “apostasy.”

ALTHOUGH IN THE UNITED STATES young millennials lead the growing wave of “nones” (those who answer “none” when asked their religious affiliation), there has been little mainstream media coverage of secular youth of color.

Being nonreligious is just one of many intersectional identities that make these nones outliers. Like their religious peers, college-bound secular youth of color face the challenge of navigating institutional racism in historically white-dominated colleges and universities and of adjusting to academic climates where they may never have a professor or dean who looks like them.

Compounding matters has been a lack of visible commitment on the part of secular organizations to the social justice and educational equity issues most relevant to communities where black and Latino youth are being incarcerated in greater numbers.*

Responding back in 2013 to the absence of any such effort, Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA) launched the First in the Family Humanist Scholarship fund (in collaboration with Atheists United, the American Humanist Association, and Foundation Beyond Belief) to provide support for foster care, homeless, undocumented, LGBTQ, and system-involved youth of color—youth populations that have historically been shut out of college access. In 2015 BSLA partnered with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) on the Catherine Fahringer scholarship for secular youth of color—the only national scholarship of its kind. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE.